Sunday, April 08, 2007

Feeling insignificant



I found the above pic on usemycomputer.com this Wednesday and found it quite fascinating. It depicts some of the known bodies of our solar system from biggest to smallest. I've actually edited the original because it was much longer and had much more on it including asteroids; 88 planets/moons/asteroids/star(the sun) in total.

What surprised me the most was that some of the solar system's moons are bigger than some planets! i.e Pluto. I don't know if that's true but it's certainly eye opening. The other was the scale of some of the larger planets but especially the sun: In the image there is practically no curve on the sun, which means even at this scale it would make the sun about a mile across! I could be wrong; but either way that makes us just microbes on a grain of sand in the Sahara desert. How important are my problems now.......

N.B. I just read here on wikipedia that Pluto was reclassified last year and is no longer a planet!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bah! Hogwash! Pluto is and always will be a planet!

Anonymous said...

Fact #675! One of the stars in the image Betelgeuse is bigger than the orbit of Mars. Now thats BIG!

How long will life on Earth rely on the Sun in the future?

Well!... we simply don't know!

PM

squish said...

Thanks Friend of Patrick Moore, lots of info there! It's deep stuff!

Anonymous said...

you could learn more, buy a telescope & check out this new book, A users guide to the meade Lxd55 and Lxd75 Telescopes, Patrick Moores Practical Astronomy